NATLANG: A Romanian Sound Change

There is an interesting change that occurs in rural Moldovan dialects
of Romanian whereby labials become palatalized velars before the vowel
/i/. I have verified that this change occurs before all labial
obstruents:
Standard Dialect Orthography
[co'pi][co'k_ji] copii (children)
['bi.ne] ['g_ji.ni bine (well)
[fi] [Si] fii (sons)
[vin] [Zin] vin (wine)
I'm not sure exactly what the environment for this change is, and I
don't have the data to figure it out. What I do remember is hearing in
my Linguistics class that this sort of change shouldn't be possible.
It has to do with feature geometry–the [labial] feature is a lip
gesture, which the tongue position can't affect. Obviously this isn't
the case, because this sound change *does* take place, but I'm
wondering if any one knows of any similar examples or can shed light
on this particular change.
(Note: Cross-posted to my blog at http://jaspax.com)
--
JS Bangs
jaspax@gmail.com
http://jaspax.com
"I could buy you a drink
I could tell you all about it
I could tell you why I doubted
And why I still believe."
- Pedro the Lion